China Mobile books 3m new 4G subs

China Mobile, China’s largest cellco by subscribers, continues to see strong 4G growth booking 3.3 million net new 4G subscribers in May, increasing the provider’s 4G user base to 8.109 million. China Mobile’s 4G customer base increased 69.0% in May, compared to 71.8% and 108.4% in the preceding two months. The cellco launched its Time Division Long Term Evolution (TD-LTE) in December last year, and intends to cover 340 cities with 500,000 base stations with the platform by the end of 2014. Local news portal ecns.cn quotes the operator’s president, Li Yue as saying that the company has so far installed more than 320,000 base stations in 300 cities. China Mobile’s rivals, China Unicom and China Telecom, have also rolled out TD-LTE platforms – albeit with far less ambitious plans than their larger competitor – but neither provider has yet published 4G subscriber data.